This book explores the great diversity and range of Islamic culture through one of the finest collections in the world. Published to coincide with the historic reopening of the galleries of the Metropolitan Museum's Islamic Art Department, it presents nearly three hundred masterworks created in the rich tradition of the Islamic faith and culture. The Metropolitan's renowned holdings range chronologically from the origins of Islam in the 7th century through the 19th century, and geographically from as far west as Spain to as far east as Southeast Asia.

An in-depth and comprehensive study of art from the Islamic world based on the preeminent collection in the Metropolitan Museum

Each reproduction is accompanied by a text that includes pertinent information about the work.

"The evolution of book art and painting in the Islamic world is the product of diverse regions and periods. Islamic art flourished in the great cities and centers of learning of the ottoman Turks, the Iranian Qajars, and the later Indian Mughals, spreading across a region that extended from the Atlantic Ocean to China. In this volume, Greg Grabar, a world-renowned specialist on Islamic Art, introduces a wide range of illuminated manuscripts from the 8th to the 17th century, placing them in their temporal and spatial context as well as identifying the main centers of artistic creation. Illuminated manuscripts of the Koran, epic poetry, and scientific works are accompanied by a text explaining the subject, describing it particular visual features, and highlighting its artistic qualities. The working methods of the artists and calligraphers are reconstructed. [...] In the book's final section the author turns towards the key moments in history, society, faith, devotion, and other aspects of the Islamic world which are represented in the images." -- Book jacket.

The two-volume Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture bridges the gap between monograph and survey text by providing a new level of access and interpretation to Islamic art. The more than 50 newly commissioned essays revisit canonical topics, and include original approaches and scholarship on neglected aspects of the field. This two-volume Companion showcases more than 50 specially commissioned essays and an introduction that survey Islamic art and architecture in all its traditional grandeur Essays are organized according to a new chronological-geographical paradigm that remaps the unprecedented expansion of the field and reflects the nuances of major artistic and political developments during the 1400-year span The Companion represents recent developments in the field, and encourages future horizons by commissioning innovative essays that provide fresh perspectives on canonical subjects, such as early Islamic art, sacred spaces, palaces, urbanism, ornament, arts of the book, and the portable arts while introducing others that have been previously neglected, including unexplored geographies and periods, transregional connectivities, talismans and magic, consumption and networks of portability, museums and collecting, and contemporary art worlds; the essays entail strong comparative and historiographic dimensions The volumes are accompanied by a map, and each subsection is preceded by a brief outline of the main cultural and historical developments during the period in question The volumes include periods and regions typically excluded from survey books including modern and contemporary art-architecture; China, Indonesia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Sicily, the New World (Americas)

This monumental new book is the first to celebrate the greatest and most iconic paintings from the encyclopedic collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, one of the largest, most important, and most beloved museums in the world. This impressive volume's broad sweep of material, all from a single museum, makes it at once a universal history of painting and the ideal introduction to the iconic masterworks of this world-renowned institution. More than 1,000 lavish color illustrations and details of 500 masterpiece paintings, created over 5,000 years in cultures across the globe, are presented chronologically from the dawn of civilization to the present. These works represent a grand tour of painting from ancient Egypt and classical antiquity and prized Byzantine and medieval altarpieces, to paintings from Asia, India, Africa and the Americas, and and the greatest European and North American masters. The Metropolitan Museum of Art includes and introduction and illuminating texts about each artwork written specially for this volume by Kathryn Calley Galitz, whose experience as both curator and educator at the Met makes her uniquely qualified. European and American artists include Duccio, El Greco, Raphael, Titian, Botticelli, Bronzino, Caravaggio, Turner, Velázquez, Goya, Rubens, Rembrandt, Brueghel, Vermeer, David, Renior, Monet, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, Degas, Sargent, Homer, Matisse, Picasso, Pollock, Jasper Johns, and Warhol. The artworks are arranged in rough chronological order, without regard to geography or culture, offering a visual timeline of the history of painting, from the earliest examples on pottery jars made over five thousand years ago to canvases on which the paint has barely dried. Freed from the constraints imposed by the physical layout of the Museum, the paintings resonate anew; and this chronological framework reveals unexpected visual affinities among the works. For those wishing to experience the unparalleled breadth and depth of the Met's collection, or study masterpieces of painting from throughout history, this important volume is sure to become a classic cherished by art lovers around the world.

The engaging and accessible volume offers invaluable insights and novel perspectives on what is perhaps the most iconic of all Islamic art forms: the handwoven carpet. With a history stretching back to the fourteenth century and a geographic reach spanning Europe to Eurasia, Mongolia to the Middle East, Islamic carpets boast a degree of innovation and technical skill to rival the world's most exalted works of art. Beauty and brilliance emerge in equal measure from carpets of all forms be they colossal silk rugs exchanged as gifts by sultans and kings or small and sturdy textiles woven for use in nomadic encampments. Some sixty superlatives examples from the Metropolitan Museum's collection—from Persia, India, Turkey, North Africa, and across the Islamic world—are presented here in lavish detail, with concise and approachable texts that position each work in historical and cultural context. Beginning with a discussion of materials and techniques, How to Read Islamic Carpets offers a comprehensive introduction to this captivating art form, and reveals the lasting influence of carpet-weaving traditions in lands far beyond the Islamic world.

This volume and the exhibition it accompanies bring together eighty of the finest masterpieces in the collection of the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon. All of the works of art are richly illustrated in color and described in authoritative texts by the curators of the Gulbenkian Museum. These magnificent pieces, which reflect the renowned art collector Calouste Gulbenkian's eclectic taste, include paintings by Rubens, Fragonard, Gainsborough, Turner, and Manet; silver from services created for the nobility of Russia and Western Europe; Roman medallions; Ottoman ceramics; Japanese lacquerware; jewelry by Lalique; and books and textiles from both East and West. These works of art offer dazzling testimony to Gulbenkian's devotion to the quality of the individual object and to his refined connoisseurship. The Calouste Gulbenkian Museum was created under the terms of Gulbenkian's will in order to preserve under one roof the artworks in his collection--one of the preeminent art assemblages of the first half of the twentieth century. Gulbenkian, a successful businessman who was born in 1869 in Ottoman Turkey to an Armenian family, made his fortune in the oil industry. In April 1942, in the midst of World War II, he arrived in Lisbon seeking a peaceful place to live. Portugal had remained neutral in the conflict that was engulfing the world. Gulbenkian spent the rest of his life in Lisbon, where he died in 1955. As a collector--whether of ancient Egyptian art, Islamic art, or European painting and decorative arts--Gulbenkian acquired "only the best."